This paper describes an algorithm that characterizes logical relations between different interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences. The proposed method uses general properties of natural language determiners in order to generate a model which is indicative of such entailment relations. The computation of this model involves information about cardinalities of noun denotations and containme...

It is an interesting and noticeable fact that in the early stages of language production, children omit certain elements from their speech. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that children regularly omit certain function morphemes, as opposed to content words. Function morphemes (including determiners, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and inflection morphemes) form a natural class from both a p...

AIMS To estimate the heritability for ocular refraction and its determiners in a population based cohort of 20-45 years old twins. METHODS 114 twin pairs (53 monozygotic and 61 dizygotic) participated. Refraction was determined in cycloplegia and eye dimensions were measured with ultrasound. Educational length was assessed. The heritability was estimated employing aetiological model fitting. ...

Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the product...

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives , the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses) , and, according to Hom 1 999 and Giannakidou 2001 , any. Despite the attention indefinites have received in the literature, characterizing what is common to all o...

Prior research has indicated that readers and listeners can use information in the prior discourse to rapidly predict specific upcoming words, as the text is unfolding. Here we used event-related potentials to explore whether the ability to make rapid online predictions depends on a reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Readers with low WMC were hypothesized to differ from high WMC readers ei...

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in For-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIR’s always receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb, and the modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing, respectively, the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles pre...

In this paper I propose a structural account of conservativity, which derives it as a byproduct of the syntax-semantics interface. In this approach, the reason for the absence of non-conservative determiners from natural languages is that in entering chain relations in the syntax, they would either lead to trivial meanings (in a sense to be made precise) or to quantificational clauses truth-con...